


Promises To Keep

by alethiometry



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-03-07 20:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3181613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethiometry/pseuds/alethiometry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam takes a detour in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Promises To Keep

"There is a thin, semantic line separating weird and beautiful, and that line is covered in jellyfish." — Welcome To Night Vale, _The Whispering Forest_

 

\---

 

There were jellyfish swimming through the forest. They shimmered in the dusky twilight, their short, lazy tendrils floating behind as they drifted, borne on invisible eddies of air through the towering pines. In the sky, the first whales of the evening were waking with the stars, stretching from a good day’s sleep and dissipating the last remnants of the clouds that clung to their translucent backsides like barnacles on a ship’s hull.  
  
Below the jellyfish and between the trees ran a long, black road and on that road ran a long, black car. Its engine roared and rattled down the two-lane asphalt, and it might have been speeding if there were any other cars on the road to serve as a frame of reference — but as it was, it was the only car out that night. Maybe it was the only car out on any night.  It didn’t really matter.  
  
The man in the car might have been driving for an eternity, or he might have started driving not five minutes ago.  He couldn’t tell, but the sky was clear and the forest was beautiful and the steady pounding of the tires on asphalt was downright hypnotizing, so he wasn’t bothered. Sometimes the forest would whisper to him, although he had no idea what it was saying. Soothing words, he supposed. Words that belonged to a hazy memory of warmth and sunlight and dust motes swirling like fairy dust around a face that loved him, and that he loved. He had no idea where the memory came from. It was a good memory, though, one that warmed him from the inside, so he cradled it inside him and urged the car on.  The jellyfish parted to make room, and the whales gamboled and frolicked in the silvery moonlight.  
  
It occurred to him, an indeterminate amount of time later, that he didn’t have to keep driving. He hadn’t seen a single other car the entire time he’d been on the road (however long it had been); there was nothing stopping him from simply parking it right in the middle of the road, engine sputtering gently into faded silence, and getting out to explore the whispering forest with its migrant jellyfish and celestial aquarium. So he did.  
  
The closest jellyfish shied away from his tentative touch, but others brushed him as they passed, soft puffs of coolness on his back and legs and hair. He fought back a smile, until he realized that there was nothing to fight back against, and then he grinned in unbridled wonder at the forest that loved him.  
  
In the sky, some of the whales were swooping to skim the treeline, scratching their backs and sides and stomachs on the highest branches and sending a rain of pine needles to the ground. The trees seemed to laugh lightly.  
  
 _Moon jellies,_ he thought. _Humpback whales._ He realized he’d seen them once before. But they’d been in the ocean, then, and he above them, in a boat, off the coast of Monterey, California. It had been a bright, clear day, but cold. Neither of them had ever been on a boat before.  
  
 _Them?_ Who was _them_?  
  
The pines were dripping with resin and he stepped closer to one, inhaling its dusty vanilla scent and running his hands over the rough, warm bark. Again, his mind drifted to those fairy-dust motes, dancing in the sunbeams across mussed-up bedsheets. Strange. His hands came away sticky with sap, but he didn’t mind, simply wiped them on his jeans and followed the current of jellyfish deeper into the forest. He wasn’t worried about losing the car; it would be there, had always been there waiting for him when he needed it. Either he would find the road, or it would find him.  
  
In the meantime, the whispering forest drew him in, its unintelligible words a thread that had twined itself round his heart. He didn’t know why, exactly, the jellyfish were swimming the direction that they were — just knew, in the very depths of his soul, that he wanted, needed to follow them.  
  
They came to a clearing — he and the jellyfish — and there, in the middle, unshaded by the pines that grew two, three times its height, was a laurel tree. As he came closer, he thought he could make out, for the first time, the whispers that had called to him all the way from the long, black road.  
  
 _Sam, Sam, Sam._  
  
Jellyfish danced amongst its golden leaves, and he knelt in front of it, placed his hands on its — _her_ — bark and felt a warm, gentle thrum that reverberated through his arms, into his heart. He remembered a name, then: three syllables, although she preferred just one. He rested his forehead on the laurel, tears pricking his eyes, and breathed the scent of her.  
  
Her branches rustled in welcome, in consolation, in love and forgiveness, and in the sky the whales began to sing.


End file.
